Optimization Is a Verb, Not a Finish Line
- Stephan Bajaio
- Jun 26
- 38 min read
Stephan Bajaio on the Awakened Titans Podcast with Lily Patrascu | May 23, 2026
Many teams see SEO as something they can check off a list, but that's not the case. Optimization is an ongoing process of making sure your content matches how people search. Brands that treat SEO as a one-time goal often end up falling behind.
In this episode, Stephan Bajaio talks with Lily Patrascu about why you can't be the answer to every search, how to align your content with real search intent instead of just chasing high numbers, and why it's important to make people feel understood. If you work in organic growth, manage content, or have ever been told to just rank higher, you'll find this episode helpful.
About the Show
This conversation originally aired on the Awakened Titans Podcast, hosted by Lily Patrascu. The episode aired as "How To Attract Clients With AI SEO."
Connect with Lily Patrascu on LinkedIn.
Watch the Episode
Key Moments
00:00 AI SEO Client Attraction
01:55 Optimization Over Acronyms
07:34 Web Presence Intelligence
11:01 Keyword Research That Converts
18:09 Problem Unaware Content Strategy
29:38 Content Workload Reality
30:28 Turn Posts Into Tools
34:35 Signals For AI Search
39:02 Stand Out With Humanity
42:25 SEO Strategy And Risks
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Lily: How would you like to attract clients with AI SEO? Stephan Bajayo will tell us how to do this. And what's so special about Stephan is he's the CEO and co-founder of Vibe Logic, and he is the vibe behind Vibe Logic. An energy first leader known for his ability to galvanize teams, translate teams into action, translate, sorry, translate vision into traction and con- connect strategy to what people actually care about.
[00:00:32] And as co-founder of Conductor, Stephan helped shape one of the most respected names in enterprise SEO, scaling the company to a $525 million valuation, building a 65-person professional services team and navigating multiple Multiple. Um, gosh, I cannot see. Um
[00:01:00] And navigating multiple tr- and navigating multiple transitions, including a s- a sale to WeWork and a founder-led buyback. So Stephan, tell us about how to attract clients with AI SE- One funny thing about me is that I don't know a lot about AI SEO, but sometimes people find me with, uh, ChatGPT, and I don't know how I got there.
[00:01:29] So- How, how does someone, uh, leverage AI SEO to attract clients?
[00:01:36] Stephan: Sure. So the, the, the... Thank you first and foremost for having me on the podcast, Lily. I'm excited to be here. Um, I, uh, I usually am the contrarian in the groups, right? I'm the one who tries to tell people, "This is not the droids you're looking for."
[00:01:55] So AI SEO, essentially, or AEO or GEO or one of the hundred other acronyms that people are using right now to define trying to rank in the LLMs, is not really where most people should be putting their efforts, right? Ideally, when you think about, the only thing that is the same in all of those acronyms, whether it's AEO, GEO, SEO, AIO, which is AI overviews in Google, all of them have an O, optimization.
[00:02:30] So optimization is an action. It's a verb. It's a constant. It- you don't get there, right? You don't achieve a point and then that's it, I never do it again, right? So when I think about rankings and, and the way you wanna perform as an organization to get more visibility, you don't necessarily wanna approach this right now as a land grab, trying to show up in ChatGPT and so forth.
[00:02:57] Because most companies haven't even figured out how to rank in Google well, and if they have, like, they're lucky. Because most companies I've ever dealt with, whether they're large enterprise companies or really small mom-and-pop small businesses, they tend to get distracted by the wrong things. Listen, it's very easy right now with AI, as important as it is in this world, and it is very important, it's, it's earth-shattering, right?
[00:03:28] In the way it's affecting our, our businesses. Um, a lot of focus is being put there, but all of that information has to come from somewhere, right? So reflecting back to what's most important is actually what your website is saying. Most websites I look at are usually treating someone's entire need either as a sales pitch instead of a solution- They're not framing the problems correctly.
[00:04:02] So in other words, they're not using the language of the consumer. Like, what would I be looking for, Lily, if I was looking for you, right? So what would I search? Um, am I just looking for best, or am I looking for something more specific? And if I look for something more specific, do you have a paragraph or a page devoted to that on your website?
[00:04:22] And if you do, then the AIs, the LLMs, and the search engines can interpret that content. But if you don't even have that content to begin with, and you're hoping you're gonna show up in the LLM game and all of that stuff, it's a bit of a fool's errand. And there's been a lot of focus on trying to rank in the LLMs, and honestly, there are products that do that, and people are day trading it and trying to get in there and so forth.
[00:04:46] And I'm not saying don't look at it, but I am saying 9 times out of 10, 9.5 times out of 10, you would be better served to understand better the wisdom of your organization, what problems you really solve, framing them well and deeply so that they connect with the person who's actually searching, whether that's in an LLM or on a search engine or anywhere for that matter.
[00:05:16] Maybe even they just land on your site because there was a link. Um, does your site, do your pages do a great job of being empathetic, connecting, and explaining themselves well? Those are the three things I think, you know. So it's not to say who cares about ranking in LLMs, but it is kind of to say of all the things I'd focus on if I was a digital marketer today, which I am, that's not gonna be my number one.
[00:05:46] Lily: Thank you. So for companies that do what you said, are they findable in, uh, AI SEO, or do they have to do another step to make this happen?
[00:05:56] Stephan: So they're definitely findable, um, especially if they have, first and foremost, you know, you'd be amazed how many sites I look at where the actual thing you're offering, the actual product, the a- is, is not in the terms of the consumer, right?
[00:06:11] They're not using the way a person searches as actual terminology on their website. They're completely missing that. So that doesn't necessarily change when someone enters information into a prompt in an LLM. It just gets longer and harder to identify, right? Which is why they have fan-out queries that actually do searches in Google and so forth.
[00:06:33] So it's funny that everyone's trying to, to focus there, when in reality, if you rank well organically, traditionally you should rank well in LLMs. It's also important to note there's no such thing as a, quote unquote, "rank" officially in an LLM. And the reason I say that is, I would highly recommend anyone interested in this, like, to get in deeper, go look at what Rand Fishkin put out at SparkToro, um, his report on...
[00:07:05] I think they did, uh, thousands of queries and the same prompt. Like, if you and I, Lily, put in the same prompt, the odds that we're gonna get the same results and the same order of those results, the order of results I think was one in 1,000 to get the same results and the order of results. Uh, to get the same results in a different order is one in 100.
[00:07:29] So the reality is, like, are you gonna be a part of that conversation? Yes, potentially. I think, and this is where I've tended to point more businesses, you'd be better suited to do what I call web presence intelligence, 'cause, you know, we need another acronym, right? Uh, I look at it as forget whether or not you're the citation right now, because honestly, the models keep changing, right?
[00:07:55] The models are constantly changing. So no one... Anyone who's telling you, "Yeah, I'm gonna make you show up in the LLMs, and I'm gonna do it in ChatGPT, and you're gonna..." First and foremost, like, the measurement models there are not secure. We don't know how accurate they are. So someone making you rank for a really long prompt isn't necessarily a success, right?
[00:08:16] And then the second point is- Rather than just thinking about showing up in the LLM, understanding what the LLM brings back as result types. In other words, like is a Reddit thread being constantly brought up? Is a YouTube video frequently referenced when it comes to the topic you care about? M- like literally, what are the, what are the elements that come back?
[00:08:41] Same with a search engine. You can't be all the answers on page one. You could be one of those answers, but there might be other types that show up So, if a Reddit thread shows up, is anyone posting on that Reddit thread from your company and trying to have a conversation? Not sell, but have a conversation so that you can be credible.
[00:09:01] Like, you're a subject matter expert, are you engaging on that Reddit thread? If a publisher shows up, okay, has any PR done outreach to that author of the publisher that sh- of that article? Um, has anyone looked at whether or not we can buy the display ads on that page and make that part of our strategy, right?
[00:09:22] So why do I say these things? Because ultimately, the LLMs and whatever's coming afterwards, because we're at the very beginning. I like to do dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee. If you know that reference, guys, you know that's a dial-up modem. That is where we are right now with AI and LLMs. We're gonna be looking back at this time.
[00:09:43] Like, just think about what it was when COVID hit and how we didn't get on screens like this and have meetings and all of that stuff, and how different and how, how much now that seems like a million years ago. We're gonna be looking back at chats and saying how funny it was that AI was this chatbot we went back and forth with, right?
[00:10:03] So before you think about pouring too much money and effort there, what I'd say is, all of these other elements that reference the topic you care to get in front of, the audience you wanna be in front of, they're gonna land on all these other elements. So are you aware of what those elements are, and are you making sure as...
[00:10:24] Your web presence is part of those conversations wherever you can be. Buy, borrow, or build your way into the conversation. The, that's the way I, I look at, uh, approaching this, because it's not just AI, right? It's SEO, AI, and really it's content. Are you doing anything from a content perspective to meet your consumer where they are, whenever they are, wherever they are, and on their own terms?
[00:10:54] That's really what it comes down to. So sorry, I went running on that one, Willy, but you let me go.
[00:11:00] Lily: Thank you. How do you decide what you should be ranking for, what you should be targeting to be found for? Like, and where do you find out this information? Is it in Google Keyword Planner? Is it in Ask the Public or something similar?
[00:11:15] Is it in, like, the YouTube, uh, videos that are most popular that have millions of views? How do you discover... Uh, what, what... How do you choose what you- Sure ...
[00:11:25] Stephan: should
[00:11:26] Lily: be ranked for?
[00:11:27] Stephan: All, all of the above, and even more. So, um, a Semrush, S-E-Mrush, uh, a Similarweb, great sources right now to just identify directional search volume.
[00:11:41] Okay, is it exact? N-no, because things that have zero search volume could get you conversions. Things that have 100 might get you nothing, right? So- I look at it directly and say, "Oh, wow, this term has thousands of searches for it, and this one has tens." You can kind of understand. Keywords don't move on their own.
[00:12:01] They move in clusters and groups as topics. So anything you can do to identify topics that matter to your audience is incredibly important. Now, you can do that a whole bunch of ways, and you can test it out first. For example, it's pretty easy to run paid ads in, in PPC. So I call those the canary in the coal mine.
[00:12:26] Like, go run a few words you think are gonna work for you and your business and point them to the right page. That's very important, too, right? It's not just about ranking. It's about ranking the right thing. 'Cause if you can connect something with a high level of specificity to a high specific page, you get a match.
[00:12:45] I'll give you a, I'll give you an example so everyone can kind of, you know, take this home and, and, and work on it. If someone searched for red 325i BMW, okay? That's a BMW, specific model, specific color. If you were to land them on a BMW page, you lose. If you land them on a 325i BMW page filled with 325i BMWs- You might...
[00:13:18] You have a very, you have a 50/50 shot that they're gonna do something, especially if they don't see a red car as one of the first results. If you land them on a page specifically filtered to red 325i BMWs, your chance at conversion, and I'm not saying people are gonna pay and click for a car online.
[00:13:37] People do that these days, but I don't. Um, you want to bring that level of specificity back, right? Does that mean you should build all sorts of pages constantly? No, not necessarily. You as a business owner know, "I sell a lot of those," or, "This tends to be the problem." Don't take out of your strategy your own wisdom, right?
[00:14:00] If you have a customer service group and they hear a lot of feedback, whether that's about you or your competitors, think about that. How might people be doing those searches? What else shows up when I do those searches? One thing that Semrush and, and frankly, um, uh, SimilarWeb are great at, find the pages that show up for the terms you think you should show up for.
[00:14:23] Drop one of the k- one of the URLs that's actually ranking into Semrush. See what else they're showing up for in terms of keywords. It's a great way to identify words that you might wanna be going after organically.
[00:14:36] Lily: Thank you. When you know there is a big market for something, and yet there doesn't seem to be proof of it in terms of, like, when you're looking for the keyword in Google Keyword Planner or in Ask the Public, um, how else do you validate the, which keyword you should be going after?
[00:14:55] Stephan: Sure. So, um, that's where I would say, um, one other thing that I forgot to mention that we should definitely put on is if you don't have Google Search Console on your, on your website, you should absolutely have it. It's free, and it's going to tell you the words you're getting impressions for. Impressions doesn't necessarily mean clicks yet.
[00:15:13] So you could be showing up in, you know, really badly, but you are showing up in the top 100, let's say, and it's letting you know, hey, you know what? These words might be important, and they map to this page. So you might wanna connect those two things together. So that's definitely, like, you can find that when you write stuff, ooh, this is starting to show up and I might wanna consider it, right?
[00:15:35] Now, for words that are, like, something brand-new, you know, like AI or LLMs, right? That was new before it was new, so we didn't know how people were gonna search for those things. The thing I tend to do, I look at, um, Google Trends, so I start to try and use Google Trends to understand what's going on. I try to look at, at the bottom of searches, there'll be other searches that are related to that search.
[00:16:00] So are other searches showing up? Answer The Public and autocompletes are really interesting, too, 'cause you can start to see autocompletes tend to be the most frequent search volume things that are next. They may not be super popular yet, but they're definitely being searched, and you can see that. So I would highly recommend, um, you focus on that sort of thing.
[00:16:25] But you don't have to reinvent the wheel, right? Most of the times, like, I'll give you an example, Lily. How many times have you searched Google and gotten a zero result, nothing comes back?
[00:16:36] Lily: Never.
[00:16:37] Stephan: Right. Exactly. You usually don't get that from an LLM either. So you're gonna get something. So when that something comes back, go to Semrush and drop it in.
[00:16:47] See what other words are showing up right now, right? That, that content, whatever's coming back, is probably gonna rank for something. And if it does, then you can start to say, "Hmm, maybe I wanna be more like that. Maybe I should think about creating that." And then you watch it over time, right? Don't day trade this.
[00:17:06] That's the number one thing I want people to realize. SEO is like a 401. It compounds over time. You don't day trade it. Paid, PPC, you day trade. You day trade PPC, that's fine. You get in, you get out. If you're not paying attention to it, you're probably gonna lose your shirt. You better... Google will take all your money if, if you don't do something.
[00:17:25] So make sure you're on top of that. But the reason I'm saying this is because- What you can do is recognize the trends of what's occurring, what's out there in the market, and then how people are interacting with your pages. That if your pages with Google Search Console start picking up steam for particular keywords, great.
[00:17:46] Have we mentioned that word on the page? Are we linking to the page with that word? What are we doing to be... Have we looked at the rest of the world to see what else is showing up when you look up that term, right? Are we taking action? So again, um, O, optimization, is an action. It's a verb, just like marketing is a verb.
[00:18:06] You need to take action.
[00:18:08] Lily: Thank you. How do you rank for a keyword, and, uh, how do you attract clients with AI SEO when your ideal target market needs training about what solution you're actually offering in terms of, like, they don't know that that's what they should be looking for because-
[00:18:26] Stephan: Right. Right.
[00:18:27] Problem unaware. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I know that one. So it's like, I like to think of the world as, like, you go problem unaware, then problem aware, then you go, uh, problem aware, solution unaware, and then s- uh, solution aware, and you're doing consideration. So, um, when you're at the problem unaware state, you have to go to the pain.
[00:18:50] What's the pain? Like, th- there's a pain in something. There's something that prompts them to do a search, right? So maybe that term is something like attrition, right? It's a CFO worried about losing people. Now, does that go all the way down to, like, I don't know, a, a SaaS product that deals with culture at companies?
[00:19:16] Maybe. That can get there, right? But if attrition is an issue, right, you start looking at what else is out there when people look up attrition. What are the topics? This is where an AI would help you identify topics and things that might make sense. So you could literally say to your favorite, mine happens to be Claude these days, your favorite, um, LLM, you could say, "Hey, listen, I'm looking at these results," and give it the results.
[00:19:43] These are the URLs. Read this content and tell me what's common among all of them. What do they all talk about? Okay. If I was worried about attrition and I was a CFO- What would this not do regarding attrition and ex- explanation of attrition, right? So what I'm doing is I'm trying to understand what is the key reason and the way people would express the need.
[00:20:08] I might look up other words around attrition, build a cluster of keywords, right? More than one word so I understand what my audience is searching for. And then if I understood what they were seeing, think of it as supply and demand, right? First understand the demand, the way they express themselves.
[00:20:25] Understand the supply, what comes back from Google and/or the LLMs. And once you have those two things together, you can start to say, "Hmm, how do I do a better job than them?" And I would start building out early-stage content that does that. Now, you're not doing it just to rank. This is the problem. This is what everyone gets wrong, okay?
[00:20:46] Lily, I can't tell you how many times I wanna fight this windmill. It drives me nuts. Basically, people go, "Oh, well, SEO showed me that people wanted this, therefore, I have to rank in SEO."
[00:21:02] Lily: No
[00:21:04] Stephan: All that is is a looking glass into the psychology of the consumer. Even if you never rank for that, that could end up being your number one newsletter article.
[00:21:14] It could end up being the thing that your salespeople send out after a call to the CFO they had a conversation with and say, "Look, you know that feeling you were having about worrying about attrition? We wrote a whole article about it." Right? All of a sudden this piece of content isn't just used for one reason.
[00:21:33] So just because a channel showed you the idea doesn't mean a channel is how you should measure it. The effectiveness of that content, if you're doing it well, should be divided into as many opportunities as possible. Quote it in social. You know? Use it as an email, uh, an email newsletter. Put it on your homepage as a must-read article, right?
[00:21:56] These are the ways you take a piece of content and really make it live beyond a channel and do what it's supposed to do for you, right? Don't invest time in building handmade. And by the way, there's no AI content. Don't use AI content to write. If you write it to rank, I promise you, you will rank for a hot minute, and I can show you 1,000 graphs where you just drop.
[00:22:18] Your traffic will drop. Google will come by and say... But if Lily writes it herself, there's no algorithm coming by to say, "Hey, Lily, you're a human. I don't like what you wrote. Shh." Doesn't happen. They'll judge it, but they won't, they won't ding you for doing that.
[00:22:35] Lily: Thank you. Tell me more about how someone can implement web presence intelligence.
[00:22:39] What would they put in place exactly?
[00:22:42] Stephan: Well, it depends on what kind of structured organization you are, right? If you're a smaller business, it's gonna be harder to do. Um, most businesses don't do this, and they don't do it because they don't have the flexibility to do it. By that I mean, okay, if you're a smaller business, how many of those opportunities can you take?
[00:23:00] A general marketer is gonna be running around trying to do all the stuff that you're asking of them. If you now add this to their plate- Not the easiest thing for them to do, which would be go run display ads even though we don't run display today. Uh, go do PR even though we don't do PR today. Uh, go do social.
[00:23:20] Mm, we do some social, but we don't really do it on Reddit, right? The idea there is you wanna find usually, the companies that usually can do this are a mid-market company. They already have at least two marketers on board, right? Um, and the reason I say that is because when you get to the much bigger companies, the Fortune 500 internet retailers that I've worked with for 20-something years, um, you'll find they're all siloed in their marketing.
[00:23:49] They don't talk across channels. They're all focused on their KPIs and trying to drive their number. The social person wants to drive the social numbers, and the SEO person, the SEO number, and the d- display person's doing... And so they never talk. This doesn't happen naturally. So you need to be able as a company to kind of say, "Okay, maybe that's not how the web is working moving forward.
[00:24:14] Maybe we're not just gonna be these little silos because our audience doesn't live that way. They live across these things. So maybe we're gonna get better at understanding our audience as marketers, and we're gonna follow them no matter where they go." And that's where we happen to come in and help companies both organize themselves physically to do these types of things, as well as tell them where the opportunities are so they're not running around trying to figure out where to act, but rather, hey, you already have a PR firm?
[00:24:42] Great. I've got five to 10 places you should probably go and pitch right now because they're gonna write the next articles about this topic that matters. Or you already have someone doing social? Great. Here are the 5 or 10 places in social based on the topic that we think is most important to your business right now.
[00:25:00] You should go ahead and act here, here, here, and here. So think of it like a roulette table. It's better than red- betting red or black. We try to figure out what are the odds that you're gonna get seen and part of a conversation by putting the chips in more strategic places. People can definitely do it on their own.
[00:25:18] It's just very arduous, and it's something that we, I've been working on, honestly, for over a decade, and then AI came along and kind of validated the whole thing. So I like to come in and kind of help companies, A, organize themselves in a meaningful way so they can actually get stuff done, 'cause half the time they, they, they wish they could, but they can't, and then know where to take the actions.
[00:25:46] That's, that's the, that's where I get my dopamine. I get really excited about that, as you guys can tell, and I wax poetic.
[00:25:55] Lily: Thank you. Uh, why are businesses using AI incorrectly as just a content factory?
[00:26:02] Stephan: Well, it's because it's an easy button Right? It's the easy button. You press the button, and it produces content.
[00:26:11] Woo. And it sounds great, right? Except the problem with content often, one, if you have an easy button, are you the only one that has access to the AI LLM? Of course not. We all do. We all have the same tools, right? So it's kind of like, um, you know, we all had MySpace. Not everyone made a beautiful website on MySpace.
[00:26:36] Uh, but the idea is you could keep pressing a button and more stuff just generates, right? It's not gonna rank well. Humans read it, and they know it's not human. They don't feel the connection to the content, right? And if it worked, it couldn't work, because everyone has the same button. So if you're pressing the button and I'm pressing the button and we're all creating content, then how is the AI or the search engine able to even identify what's the best, right?
[00:27:08] So it really is this slop that's getting created, that unfortunately you need to be an expert in the topic sometimes to know you haven't been sold a false bill of goods in terms of your content, right? I like to explain to people when I say, not even just the hallucination... And, and do this, do this for fun.
[00:27:26] I mean, go and ask, um, one of your favorite LLMs, um, what are the top 50 sushi restaurants in your area? And they won't all do this. They used to do this all the time, but it was a great example. Um, and it doesn't work if you live in a major city, but if you live in a town, right? Or choose a town you grew up in, and do that.
[00:27:50] See if it lies to you. But it's not like a search engine, where it goes from the most relevant to the least relevant, right? It could lie to you on number two, number seven, and number 15. You just don't know. So it doesn't go, like, the most reliable result is this, top result, and then comes down. That's what a search engine's supposed to do.
[00:28:10] That's what rankings really meant, right? And remember when we thought that Google was God, and whatever it gave us, we were like, "Oh, that must be the best thing, 'cause Google said it." We're acting that way with LLMs right now, until we get smart enough to realize that it's the same thing, right? It's not just 'cause an LLM cites it that it is the best or most important, and it definitely doesn't go in an order the same way.
[00:28:33] They're not even... The UX of it isn't even a search engine ordered list. So just be aware that a lot of that is sort of, you know, it's your, it's your best employee who lies to you 50% of the time, but you don't know which 50%.
[00:28:55] Lily: How can AI become a true content strategist?
[00:28:58] Stephan: Okay, that's a great question, and like you could say agents, and we can go into all of that, like, craziness right now, but I'm gonna spare you guys all of that stuff, and I'm gonna say this: think of it as a thought partner. Treat it as a thought partner. It doesn't write for you.
[00:29:15] It gives you more ideas. Also, I'll give you a perfect example of something I did recently, because I'm so frustrated that people don't read anymore, uh, myself included, right? I'm... I feel like I'm illiterate. I don't read. Other people don't read. We know this. People are going really quick through content.
[00:29:37] They wanna skim. They don't wanna read entire things, right? So I have this problem, and my problem is that executives think that a writer equals a number of blog posts. So if you have one writer, you're gonna produce four blog posts, one a week. That's how I measure you. It's wrong. Here's why. I needed to explain to the executive that not every blog post is the same.
[00:30:00] It's not just a question of the number of words that you might have. It also is how hard is the search results to rank for. It might be are you using a subject matter expert for this? In which case, they need to schedule time with them, record it, turn it into content, do all of that stuff. How many revisions do you wanna have of this content before you, you roll it out?
[00:30:23] All of that takes time. You can't measure that as one thing, because all of it takes time. Now, my first intention was, "Let's go write an article about this," of course. Except there's no executive that's gonna sit there and read my blog post about how they should be thinking about content creation. It's honestly too boring for them.
[00:30:45] It's also, like, executives don't have time, right? And they're my target audience. So what do I do? I go to ChatGPT... Actually, I went to, to Claude, and I challenged it with the hours and the amount of time I thought each thing would take, and I said, "Let's build this into a calculator. Let's actually turn this into sliders where it'll give you an estimated amount of time."
[00:31:07] So now that same content that was written before just became a calculator that I can share with prospects, I can share it with executives, I can share it with an audience as a whole who might also share it, right? I'm providing value, but I'm doing it in a way, shape, and form that changes the content structure.
[00:31:26] It becomes interactive. And so the executive can do this sliding and learn all the stuff and go, "Oh, that's right. I didn't think about how many rounds of review this is gonna take." And then when they see that it takes, you know, 40-plus hours, they go, "Well, there's no way I can have that person crank out four or five articles within the month.
[00:31:46] It's not gonna work." That is what I wanted them to learn. So think about your content differently. Look at any given blog post you have and challenge an LLM to say, "How could I make this into an interactive element? What could I do with it? How could I change the dynamics of how this can be used?" So it's a different way of thinking, but it's, it's something that frankly we should be doing.
[00:32:11] Why shouldn't the web be more i- interactive than frankly, like, us just reading stuff? And now you don't have to be a coder. Like, you can Vibe Code that. It's not hard. I don't know HTML or... Not really. I don't know code, so I was able to do it. You can probably do it too.
[00:32:30] Lily: Thank you. Tell me how someone would interact with your website, um, interactively.
[00:32:37] How would they do it? And, like, what, what exactly happens when they do it?
[00:32:41] Stephan: Well, I mean, the, the, uh, the good example of that is what I call the Vibe Check, so that Vibe Check was exactly that concept. Is it was the... That's an interactive example of a piece of content that I've created. Um, there's a whole bunch of other stuff I'm currently working on, uh, that has to do with culture and other things in organizations that...
[00:33:00] It's funny, when you get as many gray hairs as I do, you forget more marketing than some other people know, and that's not meant, supposed to be a brag or whatever. It's literally like you start realizing, oh my God, like, running a town hall. How do you make a town hall meeting better? Yeah, I've sat through hundreds of town halls in my career.
[00:33:21] Some people have only gone through a few. I, I've, I've put those together before. Here's an idea of how we do it. So anyway, when it comes to our website, vibelogic.com, you can always reach out to me there. Honestly, if you wanna have a conversation with me, LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me.
[00:33:38] Please don't sell me something. There's nothing worse than someone who does the connection/now let me sell you something. But otherwise, you know, we try to make the website as approachable as possible. We try to make our blog posts, um, always informational, and, uh, I usually wear a shirt that says, "If you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff."
[00:34:02] That's, like, a motto I live by. So I always wanna give out advice. I don't f- I'm not about hoarding advice. I think if people really want you and need you, they're gonna reach out, and they're gonna use your expertise, right? Um, so for me, it's give away as much as possible. So I do that on our blog. I do that on LinkedIn.
[00:34:23] I do that as many places, Instagram, wherever I can. I share as much of the findings and things I'm hearing about that might help others because I get dopamine doing that.
[00:34:35] Lily: Thank you. What does AI actually see when it looks at a business online? Is it like, um, let's say if you write an article that is useful, that is, uh, typically, um, searched a lot in ChatGPT, are you likely- Mm-hmm
[00:34:50] to, to be found for that particular thing?
[00:34:54] Stephan: Yeah, I mean-
[00:34:55] Lily: With that particular phrase that people are searching for. Let's say if people are searching for, like, how to publish a book in 10 minutes- Mm ... or how to publish a book about my expertise, um, quickly, or I don't know.
[00:35:08] Stephan: Yeah.
[00:35:08] Lily: Uh, like something like that.
[00:35:10] The- And then you do an article that you place on your website that is about that. Mm-hmm. Will that help- Yes ... to be found for that particular thing? That will definitely help.
[00:35:19] Stephan: That will help. What will help even more, so, um, let's work this from the inside out, right? If your website says something about you, it's the bare minimum you should be able to do.
[00:35:31] Why? Because in Google's eyes or the LLM's eyes, you control all of that. Now, if in reality, Lily, you and I work at this major company, we don't actually control the website, right? Like, a hundred people access it and do stuff and whatever. But assuming we're not at one of those large companies, right, where...
[00:35:48] And, and frankly, Google doesn't even care. They just look at it and say, "Well, you're a web entity. If you can't get your act together enough to tell me what you do or what you are really about, I'm not gonna go off and spend my time beyond that showing you off to everyone else." Makes sense, right? So first thing is get your house in order.
[00:36:06] As long as your house is sending the right signals... And by the way, your house in order doesn't just mean cleaning one room, okay? Cleaning one room is not cleaning your house. So make pathways to the page you're trying to rank for, for ex- or get cited in the LLMs. For example, let's say you did have how to write a book for your expertise, how to publish a book around your expertise.
[00:36:33] If you had other blog posts and pieces of content, maybe even service pages, that talk about publishing books, but don't actually connect and link internally to this piece of content, when Google or anything in... looks at your web entity, they're going, "Well, this isn't a very favored page. This page isn't frequently mentioned.
[00:36:56] It doesn't have a lot of connections to it. If they're not willing to connect their own pages to it, why should we think about the rest of the world?" Now, what goes beyond your website? Immediately, we go out to the rest of the web. As you go out to the rest of the web, you start to say, "What references this page on the web?"
[00:37:15] This is where external links come into play. This is why everyone was doing paid links and link building and all this stuff. When you hear those terms, link building, that's exactly what it is. It was trying to build credibility. Now, this is what's even more interesting, you don't necessarily need the link.
[00:37:33] You need the citation, so, or the, or the reference or mention. If your brand is being mentioned in terms of e-books and publishing and so forth are all on a very authoritative page out there, even if there's no link to your website, that connection is being made by the LLM and potentially sourcing that page.
[00:37:56] You gotta make sure that there aren't five pages about the same topic on your site, 'cause if there are, and they're all very close to one another, it's gonna be really hard for the LLM to figure out which one of these should I actually reference. And in the case when there's confusion in any model, they will default to simplicity So if you show two pages that are super close to one another and someone else shows another page that's not as good as your two pages, but it's the only page they show and they're definitive, usually models will fall to the definitive example rather than trying to pick between two, 'cause they don't wanna get it wrong, and they know they'll get it right if they get...
[00:38:38] just choose this. So what you wanna do is make sure that you're sending a very strong signal, that the rest of your website confirms that signal, that you get as much of the rest of the web to confirm that signal with actual links and so forth, and mentions. And the more you do that, the more authority you end up having, the more you end up showing up in the LLMs, the more you end up showing up in the search engines.
[00:39:02] Lily: Thank you. How can brands stand out?
[00:39:08] Stephan: Right now, the number one thing you can do is make someone feel seen online. Make someone feel seen. Uh, I like to... I have this analogy I use. You have to be old enough to understand this reference, but I'll throw it out there anyway. Back in the day, back in my day, before digital, we used to have these wedding albums, and they were massive.
[00:39:35] I mean, they were expensive, leather-bound, massive wedding albums that came out after the wedding, and it usually took six months or more to get them. Right? You weren't getting your wedding photos, like, right away. And why do... why bring this up? Because you would go to your cousin's house after not seeing them for, I don't know, three, four, five months since the wedding, and they would take this big album and they'd plop it down on your lap.
[00:40:00] And you were then kind of forced, because you were courteous, to flip through and say, "Oh, what a beautiful bride." But what were you really looking for? Lily, what were you looking for in the wedding album? Let's be honest. Photos of yourself. Yeah. Everyone's looking for photos of themself. Why? 'Cause they just paid a professional photographer.
[00:40:19] By the way, not everyone had a phone in their pocket that took amazing photos, right? So getting a good photo of yourself wasn't easy. Now, they had paid someone to go do that. You were looking through the album, and you're, like, hoping you're gonna find a photo of yourself. That's human nature, right? That's no different than when people are reading things on the web.
[00:40:40] If they, if you... You know when someone gets you, right, as a brand. Like, you can see it, the way they're talking, the language they use. It sounds, it feels right, right? It's not the same AI nonsense that, you know, it- the same repetition of the words, and you can kind of feel it, and it feels off. It doesn't feel right.
[00:40:59] The more brands focus on the humanity of what they're trying to solve for people, the more real they are, the more money they're gonna make. No question. We have more options than we've ever had in the history of humanity. Literally. You can get a shovel in every color possible. I don't know why you need a shovel in every color possible, but you can get one.
[00:41:24] And you can have it delivered to your door if you're in a major market probably within a day, right? Wonderful. We are- I don't know where in human history they'll be looking back and saying like, "Wow, they had the, they had it easy," right? Uh, but the reality is that's incredible. We have more choice than we need.
[00:41:43] In fact, people are getting fatigued by the amount of choice they have. This is why AIs and LLMs are gonna get interesting when they become assistants, because we're gonna rely on them a lot more than we probably should, because we just want to take the decisions away. Someone else make the decisions for me.
[00:42:00] But in the meantime, if you can be the brand that cuts through the noise and says, "Hey, I get you. I know what it's like. I know the problem or the pain you're feeling. I've solved it before. Here it is," that's what's gonna connect with people, and that's what's gonna turn into revenue and loyalty and all the things you want a brand to have.
[00:42:24] Lily: Thank you. What are the biggest SEO mistakes companies make?
[00:42:31] Stephan: Forcing their way into things they shouldn't rank for. Like, I'll give you a prime example. Back in the day, this was a spammy link tactic, JCPenney. Do you remember JCPenney, Lily?
[00:42:43] Lily: I think I've heard of that, but I... Is it like a cheap- Yeah, so it was a, it was- ... like a cheap brand?
[00:42:47] Stephan: Yeah, it was, it was a, it was a, it was like, um, a department store.
[00:42:50] Ah. Right? Uh, kind of like a Sears, you know? But they were ranking number one for the word rugs. Rugs. There's no way that a department store, right? Like, imagine Macy's ranked number one for rugs. They're not the number one place in the world you should find for rugs. Of all the websites on the internet, the number one ranker, Macy's.
[00:43:12] No, of course not. They don't sell the most rugs. They don't have the most rugs. They're not... But again, the system was being played with, and they were showing up for things they shouldn't show up for. Oftentimes a business thinks, "I should just show up. That's the answer." It's not the answer. You are not the answer.
[00:43:33] Think about the things you as a business are best at. What is your differentiator? What is your value proposition? What are the pains you solve? Spend your time there. Use that to build the right content to rank for the right terms to go after the right audience. You're not gonna make someone believe that you sell the best or have the best solution for rugs.
[00:43:54] You're just not, if that's not what you really offer. So you're not doing yourself any service by trying to show up for the thing that has the most search volume. That's one of the biggest fallacies ever. I had a company once tell me, I think it was Ulta back in the day, they wanted to show up for foundation.
[00:44:13] Here's the problem. Foundation is also the thing that your house sits on, and it's also a .org. So when you say foundation, that's not necessarily makeup. Just like when you say networking, which AT&T wanted to show up for because it had, at the time, 59,000 searches a month. And I told my client, "Over my dead body," and she said, "What do you mean?"
[00:44:36] I said, "Well, LinkedIn shows up there, and home networking, and you're an enterprise thing. Like, you have nothing to do there. Tell me you wanna go into something with a lot less search volume but a lot more specificity, cool. That's where your audience is." So don't mismatch your, your intention because of search volume or because you think it's a big deal to actually getting in front of the user.
[00:45:01] Like, your user's out there, I guarantee, unless you're selling something that nobody wants, in which case you don't, I don't know why you're in business. But if that's not the case, which is all the rest of us, you just need to understand what they care about, what they're trying to solve, and then you need to make sure you're solving it, both online and offline.
[00:45:20] Lily: Thank you. How do you correctly decide what you should primarily rank for?
[00:45:28] Stephan: I mean, there's a lot of ways to do it. I think you can do it by You can do it by profit margins obviously, and that's the thing that's gonna drive your business faster. But I also think it's, it's a combination, right, of like do you sell something that has a long sales cycle, like a- if you're in B2B? Um, you're gonna wanna think about that.
[00:45:53] And ranking for this, great, but how long is my sales cycle? How long are the things that are gonna take? So think about if my business had X amount more of this, where would I succeed? And if it had it within this timeframe, what would be more important? That, and- and then mapping your pages that are supposedly selling that to the keywords that are supposed to be driving that to the pain points, that's what I would be doing to figure out which one.
[00:46:24] 'Cause it's, it's too broad, right? As a question, Lily, there's a lot of different businesses, a lot of people that could, uh, that could think through it. So I wanna give a broad enough answer in that think about your content. Your content is just an example online of what your business does. If you don't have a page for that, well, shame on you.
[00:46:43] You need a page that reflects that aspect of what your business does. And then you should actually be looking at what are the keywords that it actually shows up in Google search console for, what are the competitor's pages also showing up for that are not their brand, and how can you use this information to map into your business model?
[00:47:04] Because getting a bunch of volume on stuff that has very low margin for you might actually get you lots of business, but it won't necessarily get your business going in the right direction. Now, if you told me, "If I can get a bunch of people who buy this, they tend to upsell into that," okay, we've got a model.
[00:47:22] Let's do it. Let's even think about how our content might talk about the potential future upsell while they're about to buy their first thing from us, right? There are ways to do that, but it's, it's something I think every business needs to think really long and hard about before they just go off trying stuff.
[00:47:39] Lily: Thank you. Will it work against you if you do, for example, based on what you said earlier, that if, um, someone is looking for a particular keyword, and let's say if, um, you do... If you're looking for a personal branding coach in London, click here, and then basically the entire page is the same as another one which will be if you're looking for a book publisher in London, click here.
[00:48:05] And then the entire page is basically exactly the same. And if you do, let's say, 50,000 pages, you know, like with one click- Mm-hmm. Yep ... that are basically just varying the keyword but the entire page is the same, will that work against you, uh, or will it work for you?
[00:48:21] Stephan: Okay. So that's a great question, and that's, that's basically like I was charged with a marketplace in the past, so I know exactly- Kind of that similar problem.
[00:48:31] And there are a lot when you look at scale, right? That becomes an issue, right? Can I really create unique content for every single one of those things? I'll point you to an example of how you can do that really effectively and people that have, and then how not. So first, let's start the how not. You're not in the best situation if You just create the same page over and over and over again and just change a few keywords.
[00:49:02] You're waiting for a search engine to come by, and you might rank today, you might rank tomorrow, you might rank for three months. Okay? So the, it might be worth it because it's really what we call long tail. It's a very long, non-competitive term. If that's the case, where there aren't a lot of unique pieces of content against you, that might be the best thing on the internet for Google to rank for it, so it'll work until it doesn't, right?
[00:49:33] Because you're living on a house of cards at that point. There's a... You've created a liability in the way that you've built your content strategy. So at any given moment, you're not allowed to complain when Google steps on your air hose and you're like, "Ugh, I don't, I, I don't know what I'm gonna do. All of a sudden, all the traffic from all these 50,000 pages has disappeared."
[00:49:52] I've seen that happen. Trust me, you're not allowed to complain about it because you lived for longer than you probably should have on it. Now let's talk about the right way to do that. There's an industry where everyone has to use the same data You guys know what it is? Take a guess. Scream it at your screens, even though you're alone.
[00:50:11] That's very strange. Okay.
[00:50:14] Lily: No idea.
[00:50:14] Stephan: It's real estate. It's real estate. The MLS allows, Multiple Listing Service, it forces a house or a property to have certain aspects on it. You're not allowed to edit that at all. So everyone has the same product. So how does Zillow or Trulia or, or Realtor.com or Redfin compete with one another?
[00:50:38] Well, you create unique metrics. So let's say I was dealing with personal coaches in London, and I wanted that London page. I would actually build some elements that were unique with the data set I have. For example, how many personal coaches exist in London, right? How many personal coaches exist for particular industries?
[00:51:02] And I might put that on the page. Just like Zillow created a Zestimate score, right? What's a Zestimate score? It's a score they came up with, but it makes their page unique, right? It gives value to the user, but it also makes the page different. So every page, even though you're gonna have all these homes that are the same as the other ones, they're gonna have...
[00:51:24] This is also why they took public information about the school districts and whether they're, they're good. This is why they bring in safety metrics. This is why they... So if you bring enough public information into a page, it becomes unique. By virtue of the fingerprint in that page, is no longer the same as any other fingerprint of content out there.
[00:51:46] So if you take the time to build a template that actually involves valuable data, even better if it's your own internal data, like if you're willing to share that publicly, wow. You have data nobody else has, Google eats that up. So does ChatGPT, so does Claude, so does Perplexity, so does Grok. All of them do.
[00:52:09] So if you have some level of valuable data that you can bring forth and programmatically put on these pages- You have a much higher probability of creating a unique piece of content that ultimately, even though it has very similar content to other pages, it does have unique aspects to it. That makes it valuable, and the search engines will recognize you, as will the LLMs for that.
[00:52:36] Lily: Thank you. Is there any way to protect your content? Let's say you create original content that is not necessarily written by AI. Yeah. Can you protect it in some way? Or once it's actually, uh, on your website, people can copy it- ... people can, you know, use AI to kind of rewrite it and just basically just print out the same kind of content.
[00:52:57] Stephan: So that's a great question, Lily, and I don't know that I can give the full answer right now because it's changing so much. Like, there are laws that are changing around this stuff and so forth. What can you technically do? I mean, technically you can shut it off. Cloudflare, for example, allows you to make, uh, LLMs pay to consume your content, which is actually interesting.
[00:53:20] So they came up, Cloudflare, which is where you might host your stuff, can literally tell an LLM, like, "You're not allowed to consume this." A lot of people are thinking about what we're calling front-of-house moat and then behind the, the paywall, right? Which becomes problematic because a lot of great content now is no longer exposed to the public because of the fact that we don't want the LLMs to consume it, right?
[00:53:43] So it's almost like, um, you know, Johns Hopkins might not want you to get all of their data and just use it constantly in an AI, but they definitely want their doctors to show up. So they might let the doctors and their profiles on the outside, and on the inside they might actually, um, try to dissuade if not deny access, which that happens.
[00:54:06] If you've ever tried to get LinkedIn, for example, on ChatGPT or Claude, you'll see it says, "I can't crawl that," right? There are ways to say, "No, no, no, you're not allowed in." But if you're not allowed in, you're not gonna get cited, right? You're not... You're, you're basically saying, "I'm not a part of that any longer."
[00:54:22] So there isn't an in-between right now. It's really an on-or-off switch. Um, I would say- You know, r- rules will change, laws will change. The thing that was great about Google was they recognized usually pretty well who was the first to publish data, so they gave you the credit no matter what. The problem is LLMs are taking your content and literally eating it and changing it into brand-new stuff.
[00:54:50] So the credibility there is problematic, but it depends what you're really, what you care more about. Do you care more about your content, or do you care more about the acquisition model that would bring people to the site? Um- Thank you. How can- I'm not as worried right now about AI com- eating- Thank you
[00:55:08] my content, quite frankly. Mm-hmm.
[00:55:09] Lily: How can people connect with you?
[00:55:11] Stephan: Sure. So, uh, definitely on vibelogic.com, reach out to me there. Like I said, LinkedIn, Stephan Bajio. It's not even on our screen here, so I'll ask Lily to put a link when she posts this. Uh, LinkedIn, S-T-E-P-H-A-N B-A-J-A-I-O. If you look me up, honestly, if you look me up in Google, you're gonna find me.
[00:55:34] You're gonna find my personal site. You're gonna find, uh, my, a bunch of stuff I've done, and luckily, hopefully, you're gonna find this episode, so, uh, if we're doing it right. So, um, definitely, uh, happy to help anyone in whatever way I can. Like I said, I get dopamine out of helping folks, um, even if it's not like, ooh, we need to do some crazy big engagement.
[00:55:56] I do love helping people, so anything I can do to advise or help people along the way, I'm, I'm really happy to do.
[00:56:03] Thank you
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